Today we are releasing activEcho 2.5. This is an exciting release as we have been working with many customers over the past few months to nail down their evolving requirements for file sharing and syncing. Many of these conversations are with our customers in healthcare, financial services, pharma, education, publishing, advertising, government, and legal. This is a fast-moving market and although customers were very happy with our 2.1 release, they always come up with new requirements! They learn and we learn together. So in line with this non-stop evolution and constant re-iteration of the product, this is what we’ve been doing to address their needs with 2.5:

• IT needs better storage management and control. In activEcho 2.5 we are adding storage quotas. For Active Directory users and ad-hoc users, IT can set policies and users can view quota status, receive alerts and purge unneeded content when demanded. This helps IT to keep storage demand under control as well as on budget.

• Users wanted more sharing and syncing options. So, we added “download only” and “read only” folder settings. Very useful for one-way document sharing and distribution, typical in many organizations. In addition, users wanted control on what to sync, so in 2.5 we also added the ability to define what folders are synced to Mac and PC desktops or just stay on the server for access via mobile devices or using a web browser.

• Compliance, security and content control. Organizations have been asking for the ability to take ownership or re-assign ownership of content when circumstances demand it. For instance, when an employee leaves the organization it seems reasonable to be able to make somebody else responsible for his/her content, projects and such. So we added a new administrative “change content ownership” feature to give IT that ability.

• Scalability and performance for large structures. We enhanced our Active Directory support, login compatibility and other parts of the product to ensure we perform at light speed even when dealing with tens of thousands of users in the system.

• And several other functions like more management options for mobile devices, tighter integration with mobilEcho and refinements to existing features.

We’re sure our customers will enjoy these new set of features. But we and our customers have short memories, so since 2.5 is out, we are already working on the next one. You can expect to see us rolling out new exciting features soon.

Today we announced a new version of our ExtremeZ-IP solution. With ExtremeZ-IP 7.3 we continue to provide the only true solution for seamless integration of Mac Computers and Windows servers. With ExtremeZ-IP 7.3, we continue to make performance improvements and other enhancements that make ExtremeZ-IP the cornerstone of any enterprise Mac and Windows server strategy.

Today, thousands of organizations are using ExtremeZ-IP to meet their business needs. Historically, these have been concentrated in what I would call core Apple strongholds – advertising, media and entertainment, print/publishing, graphic designers, other creative fields, and education – but over the last two years we have seen an increase in interest from non-traditional verticals. This is partially due to the BYOD/Consumerization trend where employees are now either demanding to be able to use Mac Computers at their work or IT departments that are seeing the benefits of allowing employees to choose their platform. ExtremeZ-IP makes this decision a lot easier by providing the seamless integration required to avoid unnecessary help desk calls, performance issue, file corruption issues, incompatibilities and to maintain the integrityof the Mac user experience. With ExtremeZ-IP 7.3, we make this decision even easier.

Another reason for the growth of Mac Computers has been the halo effect of the iPad and iPhone. Clearly, these two products have given Apple unprecedented visibility, and many enterprises have taken a second look at their approach to Apple products. This InfoWorld article, amongst many others, lays it out pretty well from a numbers perspective. And certainly yesterday’s Apple results showed that Mac’s presence in the marketplace is accelerating.

Another interesting item that crossed my desk a few weeks ago was data combining iPad and Mac and showing how adding in iPad drastically changes how you look at Apple. I know this topic gets people all riled up on whether or not iPad is replacing or augmenting desktops/laptops. I don’t think it’s an either/or scenario. But there is no doubt it is having an impact. Far more interesting is that PC sales are decreasing and Mac sales are increasing. And it’s not a subtle difference; it’s very significant. This article from Fortune does a good job of showing the impact and the trajectory. Please note that the second graph is the correct chart and that this chart came out before yesterday’s results.

From our point of view, we are in the business of supporting new platforms as they get implemented in the enterprise. We have done that for over 10 years with ExtremeZ-IP and today we continued and enhanced our support. With the increase of Mac usage in the enterprise there are many more opportunities in front of us. With mobilEcho, iPad and iPhone can also now be integrated into any environment. At the heart of what we are doing its really not just about platforms, but really about giving users seamless access to files with a lot of value add functionality and an enterprise focus on security and management.

Stay tuned for more new stuff from us in the next couple of months. Things are going to be happening very quickly…

As a followup to my last blog post, Forrester recently published a really interesting research report on Macs in the Enterprise called “People Are Bringing Macs To Work — It’s Time To
Repeal Prohibition” by David K. Johnson. The basic premise of the article is that people want to use their Macs for and that IT departments should let them. And it goes through several steps and solutions for customers to use when considering or implementing Macs in the Enterprise. Needless to say we not only agree with this but see it every day with our ExtremeZ-IP customers.

I was also very interested to see the slew of comments that accommodated this report. There were a few articles written about this report but the one that took my notice was the ArsTechnica article. They wrote up an extensive article on the report and I spent some time reading the commentary which make for interesting and entertaining reading. The first article is here and then they wrote a followup piece this week which you can read here. There are hundreds of comments but you can see that this subject definitely brings out some passionate responses.

As I have written about before there is certainly a core group of Mac users that typically are in advertising, media & entertainment, print/publishing or any of the creative fields. And there are the Education users and all the home users that would love to use a Mac at work. What we are seeing now are the non-traditional verticals also embracing the Mac. There are lots of reasons for this trend. Consumerization of IT is one. Another is the growing role of Apple in the Enteprise, as iPhones and iPads have made significant inroads. We have seen this with our mobilEcho Mobile File Management solution. This has resulted in a halo effect and a reconsideration of the Mac as an enterprise client. I am sure there are other trends and they all overlap and intersect at various points.

I expect to see more analyst reports and articles on this subject. As David K. Johnson, the author of the report points out, forward-thinking enterprises will embrace this trend. Others who do not do so at their own peril.

Again, if you are interested in reading the report you can get download it here.

Windows IT Pro magazine recently completed a review of our ExtremeZ-IP solution and gave it 4.5 out of 5! Needless to say, we are pretty excited about this and just wanted to share this article. ExtremeZ-IP is used by thousands of organizations around the world and is considered by many to be the gold standard for providing seamless file access for Macintosh clients in Windows server environments. It simply takes care of all the problems, big and small, that users encounter when trying to integrate these two disparate worlds. And the Windows IT Pro review confirms what these thousands of customers already know – it solves their problems.

In the year since I joined the company I have seen some interesting trends in our ExtremeZ-IP customers. While we have always been strong in the obvious Mac fields – education, advertising, print/publishing, media &entertainment, and other creative fields – we are also seeing other companies in non-traditional verticals opening up to the idea of supporting the Mac. So we are seeing the evolution of IT consumerization right before our very eyes. And we see the same thing with the Apple in the Enterprise trend. We see it both on the desktop/laptop side with our ExtremeZ-IP business as well as on the mobility side with our mobilEcho business. The interest level in ExtremeZ-IP (as measured by leads) has almost doubled over the last year. We are seeing more interest now than we have ever seen. The pace really started to accelerate with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and we see no sign of this slowing down.

And it’s easy to see why this is happening. ExtremeZ-IP provides true enterprise integration of Macintosh clients into Windows server environments, and addresses all the key issues, including:
• Compatibility – problems with file corruption, file permissions, application lockups and file names disappear.
• Performance – ExtremeZ-IP consistently provides a higher performing experience than competitive solutions.
• Maintains the Mac experience for the user – ExtremeZ-IP ensures Mac users maintain the full range of the Mac experience, such as spotlight search, whereas other solutions result in degraded user functionality
• Management and security – for the IT organization, management is made easy and security is maintained with integration into Active Directory.

Yesterday Apple released Lion, an important upgrade to Mac OS X, and GroupLogic is ready with an enhanced version of ExtremeZ-IP. The new ExtremeZ-IP has been improved and extensively tested confirming it supports Apple’s improvements to Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) including its improved security and all of the many functions of Lion that ExtremeZ-IP delivers to Mac users connecting to Windows servers. If your organization supports Mac clients with Windows servers and Active Directory, ExtremeZ-IP is the only solution that can deliver the complete Mac OS X experience integrating Mac and Windows users on Windows infrastructure.

GroupLogic engineers have been working with Apple engineers for months testing Lion with ExtremeZ-IP to ensure that your users can upgrade to Lion with complete confidence that their Windows file server solution will continue to provide unmatched performance and trouble free compatibility. This is the seventh major Mac OS X upgrade that we’ve supported with ExtremeZ-IP and we’re excited that Mac OS X Lion is faster and easier than ever. We’re all enjoying Lion’s cool-iOS inspired features that we’ve been experiencing on our iPads and iPhones. If you’re running older Mac OS systems, I’m happy to report that ExtremeZ-IP is backwards compatible from Lion and Snow Leopard all the way back to Mac OS 9.2 so all of your Macs can safely co-exisit with Macs running Lion.

ExtremeZ-IP bring Lion compatibility to all modern Windows versions including Server versions 2003 through 64-bit 2008 R2. ExtremeZ-IP has proven integration with the enterprise features of Windows Server including Active Directory managed permissions (often a source of trouble for Mac users with SMB), Windows Search, Distributed File System (DFS), Clustering for failover, backup solutions and the wide range of hardware choices and virtualization options available for Windows.

As we have seen over the past couple years, Apple continues to improve AFP, maintaining it’s file copying and directory listing speed advantages over the SMB (Windows file sharing protocol). And since Apple doesn’t control the SMB protocol or the SMB server on Windows, it’s unable to bring its new ideas to SMB making AFP the only way to get the full Mac OS X experience. For example, Apple has had to remove Time Machine support for the SMB protocol because of it’s inability to evolve the SMB protocol to support the needs of this important function. The speedy searches delivered by Network Spotlight are still missing when searching non-Apple servers via SMB while Network Spotlight has been supported by ExtremeZ-IP for years.

At GroupLogic, we hear daily from our customers that they rely on the compatibility and performance of AFP as delivered by ExtremeZ-IP, and the support and rapid response to maintenance issues that they know they can get from GroupLogic.

I encourage you to plan your migration path to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion as soon as practical and be sure to upgrade to ExtremeZ-IP 7.2 first.

As always, please share your thoughts and suggestions with us by writing info@grouplogic.com.